The Credibility of the Catholic Church’s Social Witness in the Wake of the Sexual Abuse Crisis

The ongoing sexual abuse crisis has damaged the Catholic Church’s credibility as a witness to the Gospel, but the church should not abandon its social witness. Rather, it must re-think its approach.

In August, the Catholic journalist Rocco Palmo reported
rumors that the United States Catholic bishops would delay the release of
their much-anticipated pastoral letter on racism, which had been slated for
publication during their annual gathering in November, and that the meeting
would focus exclusively on addressing the sexual abuse crisis within the
church. These rumors came on the heels of the report of a Pennsylvania grand
jury on sexual abuse by priests in four dioceses in the state, as well as its
covering up by the bishops, and the removal from public ministry of the retired
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Only days later, the former Vatican nuncio to the
United States Carlo Maria Viganò
released a letter claiming that the Vatican had long known of allegations that
McCarrick had years earlier sexually assaulted seminarians (although not the
claim that he had sexually abused a teenager, the allegation over which he was
sanctioned by Pope Francis and which only emerged this January). Viganò further alleged that despite
knowing these allegations, Pope Francis accepted McCarrick as a trusted
adviser.

Although
it remains unclear whether or not the U.S. bishops will in fact publish the
pastoral letter on racism, the possibility that its release will be delayed
highlights a tragic consequence of the ongoing sexual abuse crisis in the
Catholic Church: the crisis hinders the church’s ability to serve as a witness
of the Gospel to the world, both because it requires the church to focus its
energies inward by investigating and removing abusive and conspiring priests
and prelates, and because it undermines the credibility of the church’s
witness. A similar dynamic is behind the calls to delay or postpone the
upcoming synod of bishops focused on the faith of young people.

Without denying that it must be a top priority to address
allegations of sexual abuse and reform the institutions that enable it, I believe
it would be a mistake for the church to set aside major initiatives like the
racism pastoral or the synod on youth. Rooting out this evil from the church
will be a long and arduous process that cannot be completed at one annual
conference, and the church cannot indefinitely put on hold its ministry to a
world desperately in need of the Gospel. Indeed, listening to the concerns of
young people, one of the aims of the upcoming synod, ought to be central to the
church’s response to the crisis.

That being said, the bishops must be aware of how the
ongoing sexual abuse crisis undermines the credibility of the church and its
teaching, not least its social teaching. As the synod of bishops in 1971 said
in the document Justitia
in Mundo, “[A]nyone who ventures to speak to people about justice must
first be just in their eyes” (#40). Pope Paul VI made a similar point in his
1974 apostolic exhortation Evangelium
Nuntiandi, “Modern man [sic] listens
more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to
teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (#41, citing an earlier address). The
sexual abuse crisis undermines the church’s witness because it makes painfully
clear the ways in which the church has failed to witness to Christ’s love to
its most vulnerable members, and how its leaders have put the church’s
reputation and clerical privileges ahead of justice.

How can the church continue to carry out its witness to the
Gospel, including the church’s social teaching, while mindful of the ways its
credibility has been shattered? I offer three ideas I believe would be helpful,
but not exhaustive:

Humility. In
proclaiming its social teaching, the church must humbly recognize its own failure
and that of its members to live up to the ideals it teaches. In his recent book
Good
Intentions: A History of Catholic Voters’ Road from Roe to Trump,
Steven P. Millies insightfully points out how in the aftermath of the revelations
of widespread sexual abuse and its covering up in 2002, many bishops in the
United States took a strident attitude toward “culture war” issues like
abortion and same-sex marriage and ramped up lobbying efforts at the national
and state levels on these and similar issues. As Millies explains, these
bishops seemed to think that the church could recover its moral authority in
the wake of the scandal by attempting to serve as the moral conscience of a
society that had lost its way. Yet this strategy did not take adequate consideration
of how damaged the church’s credibility had become, not to mention the church’s
own failure to convince the faithful to practice what it teaches. A humbler
approach should not mean watering down the church’s teaching, but rather abandoning
the presumption that it will be accepted as a moral authority in a pluralistic
society.

Accompaniment. One
of the greatest failures of the church in the midst of the sexual abuse crisis
was its failure to clearly take the side of the victims. For decades the testimony
of abuse victims was ignored or disbelieved, and abusive priests were
reassigned from one parish to another with no regard for the threat to
potential victims. Once the cascade of allegations began in 2002, in many cases
bishops seemed more concerned with mitigating legal and financial liability
than seeking justice for the victims. One way for the church to begin to
restore its credibility is to reverse this and to clearly stand beside the
victims of abuse, to exercise what Pope Francis has called accompaniment. The
church’s social witness must include the accompaniment of both the victims of
injustice in the broader society, such as the poor, immigrants, and Muslims,
but also the victims of the church’s own injustices.

Transparency. The
theologian and economist Daniel Finn has argued that the church should put
greater emphasis on the importance of transparency in its social teaching.
Transparency, in this case, refers to the responsibility of governments and
corporations to provide information to the public about their deliberations,
financial records, and the outcomes of any actions taken. Transparency fosters
participation and accountability and helps combat corruption. But the church
itself must operate in a more transparent way if it is to restore the
credibility of its witness. First of all, local dioceses and the Vatican must
be transparent about priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse and
about how their bishops have dealt with these allegations. The church should
also implement a transparent process for investigating and disciplining abusers
and their enablers. But the church’s credibility also depends on implementing
more financial transparency, for example, for both dioceses and the Vatican. In
recent years the Vatican has been rocked by a number of financial scandals, and
in some cases dirty money and sexual abuse intertwine; for example, Marcial
Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, used donations to Vatican
officials to help cover up allegations of sexual abuse.

It will not be easy for the Catholic Church to restore its
credibility as it deals with the sexual abuse crisis, and it is practically
certain that many church leaders will act unwisely and compound the problems
already faced by the church. Nevertheless, the church should not abandon its
social witness, or postpone it until the abuse crisis is resolved. Rather, the
church must re-think how it engages in this witness, cognizant of its
diminished credibility but confident in the power of the Gospel to transform
the world.

Matthew A. Shadle is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. He has published Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy (Oxford, 2018) and The Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective (Georgetown, 2011).